Last week I sat in on this great A List Apart: On Air event titled “Designing for Performance” It was their first online-only panel with four great presenters. Along the way I picked up a few tips and tricks I wanted to share with you all.

Here’s a few quick things you can do to improve the performance of your WordPress site.

Introduction

Before we begin, if your site is accessible from the web, punch in its URL into one of the following tools (or both!).

Make a note of the scores you’re given. We’ll compare them at the end.

Use a caching solution

The first thing you can do? Install a caching plugin or setup an in-memory cache. For folks on shared hosts (Bluehost, Hostgator, etc) the easiest (and often only) option will be going with a plugin. My plugin of choice is WP Super Cache. Why this one in particular? It’s been around for ages, is super easy to use while still being customizable, and it’s authors include Donncha O Caoimh and Automattic. A pretty good pedigree if you ask me.

If you don’t want to do much mucking around, just install the plugin and turn on caching. This will allow your site to serve static version of your pages. This make your site quicker as WordPress (and the PHP/MySQL behind the scenes) doesn’t have generate a new page for each visitor.

Advanced options that I like to use are in the screenshot below. I like to make sure I enable compressing pages as less data has to get tossed around. “Don’t catch pages for known users.” is handy if you’re an individual editor (or have a small team). This tells WordPress to alway serve up a new page to folks who are logged in to your site. This way you always see your updates without having to clear the cache.

Compress your theme’s images

Let’s say you’re building a theme from scratch, using a child theme, or even just uploading a nice crisp PNG for your site’s header image. In each case WordPress will use images within the theme to display common elements – like that header image. When these elements appear on every page your site has to serve up that image to every viewer, every time.

One way to speed up your site is to make sure you compress these common images as much as possible. This doesn’t mean degrade their quality with heavy compression like jpg images, but to remove as much metadata and use more advanced compression algorithms as possible.

Side note: Another big win for leveraging smaller images is to make sure you’re not uploading giant images to only have them displayed at small sizes. That’s a whole ‘nother post on its own!

With either of these apps you can drag and drop in your images and let the tool do its magic. This includes background images, header images, or even icons used across your navigation and widgets.

Here’s an example of a recent optimization from a theme I optimized. This is using ImageOptim. Either tool uses a whole suite of tools behind the scenes to make the best optimization quickly and with great results.

I saved a whopping 47% on average in this theme. In the case of my background tile image I saved a whole 80%. Not to bad. (Here’s another example with less impressive, but still good, results.)

Set up a caching rule

Even with something like WP Super Cache in place you still might need to set up some rules about static content. Static content is things like images, documents, multimedia files, etc.

For these files, WordPress delivers the file for a visitor every time. Even if they leave and come back five minutes later!

The easiest way to do this is to modify your .htaccess file and add a few rules for static content. The .htaccess file tells your site to give folks a locally cached version of the file and to ‘expire’ the item in the cache after so many minutes. This greatly helps in the loading of those (newly optimized) theme images I mentioned in the last tip, and any other files visitors consume on a regular or repeat basis.

Minify your CSS

You’re using a child theme, right? Or maybe a custom theme built from a starter framework? Once your site is ready for production you can shrink your CSS files to make things a little quicker.

Minifying your CSS takes the human-readable version of your CSS file, with all it’s great inline comments and indents, and strips all that junk out. The computer doesn’t need any of that!

Now you’ll want to keep an un-minifed version around for future changes. Take a copy of your style.css file in your theme directory and rename it. Call it style-original.css or something and set it aside.

Now, copy and past the content of your style.css file into a tool like CSS Minifier or CSS Compressor. These tools will strip out any comments or spaces (making your file pretty much unreadable by humans) and reduce the file size (and therefore load times) of your CSS.

Copy the minified CSS back into style.css and save. If you have to make new updates down the road (always in your dev environment first, right?) you can re-load your human-readable CSS file, make your edits, and minify again.

On a few sites I manage I was seeing upwards of 60% file size savings. When were talking about mobile devices in not-so-good coverage areas that could be the difference between your site loading and a visitor leaving.

Conclusion

This is just a few things you can do quickly to improve the performance of your site. Making your site load quickly for visitors make them more likely to hang around and helps with your search rankings.

How much of an impact does it make? Remember those tests I asked to your run at the beginning of this post? Here’s a before and after (totally unscientific) comparison to a site I manage. I ran the default tests from webpagetest.org. Just using these tips made one score go from a C to a B and another from an F to a B!

If you have tips or tricks you use to make your site’s a little quicker, let me know in the comments below. Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you at one of our upcoming meetups!

When it comes to CSS Preprocessors, there are 2 big ones: Sass and Less. In Matt’s presentation he covers Sass stating that the two really have about the same features and Sass just has a bigger following.

I put together some notes from our General Meetup last month. Thanks for everyone who braved the cold and came out. I had a blast putting this together and am looking forward to Nile’s presentation later in December.

Box Model

First, let’s talk about the Box Model. The best way to approach CSS is to understand that all it does is apply rules to the boxes that make up our webpages.

All HTML elements are containers or boxes. I demonstrated this by using the 3D view in Firefox. (Right-click on any webpage, and select “Inspect element”. The 3D view is the cube icon in the top right of the inspector pane.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, allow you to define the style of those boxes. Everything from the fonts being used inside, to images, borders, padding, margins, colors, even how text behaves alignment, size, orientation, etc.

Rules

You make these changes this by defining ‘rules’ to those boxes or elements in your CSS.

So let’s say we have an element. It’s a simple div and I want to give it some rules.

<div>
<p>Some text inside that’s a paragraph.</p>
</div>

First give element a name – either an ID or a class.

That element name is called a selector in CSS parlance. We’re saying, for each element named X select

Why is this the best? You separate the presentation from structure (HTML) from content (in the case of WordPress, what’s in your database). You also can have both documents open side by side. You also don’t have to scroll up and down and up and down. And most importantly, because of CASCADING!

Here’s two examples of valid CSS rules being applied to a class and an ID respectfully.

.demoDiv {
rule:options;
rule:options;
}

#demoDiv {rule:options;rule:options;}

Difference between a class and an ID

See that “.” and that “#” – that tells us if something is either a class or an ID.

Does it make sense to identify multiple elements by the same ID? I think not. That’s what classes are for – to classify similar elements.

Cascading

The name Cascading is important! It’s how the browser determine which rules to actually apply. There are many factors at play, and that’s ok. There’s some logic to it al.

CSS Preprocessors

CSS Preprocessors were touched on at the very end of the night. Basically things like SASS and LESS allow you to define variables to your rules. When you’re ready to publish the preprocessor will render valid CSS from those variables.

In case you haven’t heard, WordCamp 2015 is officially scheduled to take place Saturday March 14th and Sunday 15th at Washington University.

While we’re having the event in the same space as this year, the organizing team has some exciting new ideas that we’re going to be working hard over the next 16 weeks to bring to the WordCamp.

While we’ll still be posting news on this site, if you want to subscribe to the WordCamp specific mailing list, head over the 2015.stlouis.wordcamp.org, or follow the organizers on Twitter at @WordCampSTL.

We’re going to host a free viewing party for WordCamp San Francisco! They’re streaming all presentations across their two-day WordCamp. October 25-26.

This is one of the biggest WordCamps and their schedule is full of awesome presenters.

We’re going to use the amazing public space at Nebula Coworking at the corner of Jefferson and Cherokee St.. There will be two rooms, one streaming the Developer-focused track, the other the User-focused track.

We invite you to join us for both days. The presentations start at 11am (9am Pacific) each day so get there early! You can stay all day and hang out in between sessions, just like an in-person WordCamp. Check out the full schedule and RSVP today!

We’d like to have light breakfast options, snacks and drinks. If you can pitch in, please let us know. We’re also working on finding appropriate sponsorship.

For lunch we’re going to hit the town and enjoy the amazing restaurants along Cherokee. We’re working on getting some recommendations and menus for some of our favorite haunts.

This is a low-key event. Come as you are, relax, and soak up some amazing knowledge.

More details coming soon. Volunteers are needed. Sponsors are needed. Get in touch!

Thanks to everyone for coming out Wednesday night. It was a really good turn out and we had some interesting discussions and questions. I didn’t have slides to share so I thought I’d write a quick post to summarize everything we went over and aggregate the resources/links that were discussed. So without further ado…

The Basics of Theme Customization

In the broadest of terms, there are three “levels” of customization that we talked about. They are, from easiest to hardest:

Customizing using the built-in WordPress customizer

Using a child theme to customize presentation

Creating a copy of an existing theme and modifying

Using the built-in customizer

This approach, while also the easiest, is the most limited in scope. For an option to be customizable via the customizer the theme developer needs to add functionality via the theme’s functions.php file.

The customizer can be accessed via the “Appearance” menu in the WordPress admin menu.

The options that appear on this page vary from theme to theme, but most themes that include this functionality allow you to customize background colors, links colors, menu, widgets, and other similar things. Certain theme “ecosystems” like ThemeForest or Elegant Themes, or frameworks like Genesis, have custom theme options that are independent of the built-in WordPress customizer but function similarly.

Building a Child Theme

If you’re looking to go beyond the basic customization allowed by the customizer (either built-in or custom), the recommended way to do this is to create a child theme. Child themes inherit all of the functionality and presentation from the parent theme with the exception of the customizations you make.

We covered the basic steps to create a child theme:

Create a new folder in the wp-content/themes

Create a style.css file and copy the required header information from codex and modify for your new child theme.

Create a functions.php file and copy the code snippet from the codex that will tie your child theme to the parent theme.

Once you’ve done these steps, log in to your WordPress dashboard and activate your new theme. If you’ve done everything correctly your site will resemble the parent theme. After you’ve verified that the new theme is working, feel free to add any of the custom CSS, HTML or PHP to make the theme your own.

A quick warning about using child themes; when the parent theme updates there is a small chance that the developer may change something that breaks your customization (i.e. renaming an element’s id or class), but this isn’t considered to be a “best practice” so you should mostly be fine.

“Forking” an Existing Theme

The most advanced way to customize a theme is to create your own theme by copying an existing theme and modifying its theme files. At the least, you’ll have to edit style.css so WordPress won’t attempt to update your new theme if the existing theme is updated.

If you purchased the theme from Code Canyon, Theme Forest, or another, there may be some ramifications if you distribute the theme. I would consult the license that came with the theme for specifics. All the themes found on wordpress.org are open source, but it is a good practice to always give credit to the original author.

tl;dr

Useful plugins:

What The File – “adds an option to your toolbar showing what file and template parts are used to display the page you’re currently viewing”

Page Builder – “Build responsive page layouts using the widgets you know and love using simple drag and drop”

We had a great turnout this month – even with the Cards game happening just a few blocks down the street. Thanks to everyone who came out!

Main Event

The main topic of the night was covering some handy tools that help you keep tabs on your WordPress site. We covered Uptime Robot, Infinite WP, and Google Analytics.

Uptime Robot

This handy website lets you know when your site is down. When a site is down that means that visitors aren’t able to see the site and won’t know why! By using Uptime Robot you can setup alerts to be notified via email or SMS when your site is inaccessible.

This is a free service and you can track up to 50 sites! They don’t have to be WordPress sites at all – this works for any site you’re interested in tracking. The service is hosted, so there isn’t even an installation process. Just sign up, add your sites, set how frequently your site should be checked and wait!

It’s also super handy if you have multiple sites across clients. You can know before they do when a site is having an issue. You can quickly figure out what’s going on, and let your clients know preemptively!

Infinite WP

Infinite WP makes managing plugins and theme updates across multiple separate WordPress installations a breeze. You install a simple client on your web host, a plugin on each of your sites, and away you go!

Infinite WP will let you know when your sites have an update available and you can update by site (all plugins at once), by plugin (this plugin on all sites where its installed), or even piece mail – one at a time. There are a ton of add-ons for Infinite WP that extend it’s capabilities even further.

A recent update also brings easy backups to your sites. So your workflow could be something like:

Get a notification of an update via Infinite WP

Backup your Dev/Test site.

Update your Dev/Test site to make sure things are hunky-dory.

Backup your Production site(s).

Update your Production site(s) without leaving your beach chair.

All of that without leaving Infinite WP.

Google Analytics

We could have easily spent multiple evenings covering the various ways you can leverage Google Analytics it’s that powerful. In a nutshell Google Analytics allows you to keep track on how visitors get to your site, what they do on your site, and some demographic information like geographic location and what browser it uses. It becomes even more powerful when you get into developing campaigns and set goals for your visitors.

Say for example you’re promoting a big event or a new item in your store. You can send out emails, tweets, and Facebook updates with a specific URL that will tell you, in Google Analytics, which outlet lead to that person arriving at your site, and what percentage of visits turned into ‘conversions’ – someone did something you wanted them to do like sign up for a newsletter or buy something.